Shadow Priest Stats - pvp

From the guide I can see crit is slightly better than mastery but a quick question.

Does the mastery (Change to Deal Damage twice on periodic spells) extra damage on tick's count towards the talents "From Darkness Comes Light" and "Divine Insight" or does it just do double damage / still only 1 tick.

A point of mastery rating gives a higher chance of double hitting than a point of crit last time I checked. So Mastery is undeniably better for DoT damage, which in PvP is most of your damage. Again, that's all just IIRC.

The reason crit is often preferred by top spriests is because when you are going for a kill - mastery is pretty much useless. Mastery has no interaction with level 90 talents, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, Devouring Plague's initial damage or Mindbender/Shadowfiend. So if you burst via Shadowfiend->Halo->Mind Blast->Devouring Plague->Procs / Deaths - none of that is really benefitting from Mastery, but all of it is benefiting from Crit - so the slim chance of getting a lucky crit somewhere in there is better than the 'nothing' Mastery is giving you.

With that said, when asked about this I usually explain all this - and then tell beginners to try Mastery rather than Crit. The reason is Mastery will feed you free procs more often, and it's more valuable for beginners to use what mana they have for Dispels - rather than worrying about going OOM all the time. Free procs give you something to do that doesn't cost you tens of thousands of mana a second - while keeping up your pressure - it also increases the mana return of VT via VT mastery procs.

The reason crit is often preferred by top spriests is because when you are going for a kill - mastery is pretty much useless. Mastery has no interaction with level 90 talents, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, Devouring Plague's initial damage or Mindbender/Shadowfiend. So if you burst via Shadowfiend->Halo->Mind Blast->Devouring Plague->Procs / Deaths - none of that is really benefitting from Mastery, but all of it is benefiting from Crit - so the slim chance of getting a lucky crit somewhere in there is better than the 'nothing' Mastery is giving you.

With that said, when asked about this I usually explain all this - and then tell beginners to try Mastery rather than Crit. The reason is Mastery will feed you free procs more often, and it's more valuable for beginners to use what mana they have for Dispels - rather than worrying about going OOM all the time. Free procs give you something to do that doesn't cost you tens of thousands of mana a second - while keeping up your pressure - it also increases the mana return of VT via VT mastery procs.

i still wouldn't recommend mastery. crit also affects renew/Pom/flash heal for offhealing situations which with the nerfs that came in make a big difference.

haste for quicker casts as shadow does hard cast quite a bit despite what people may joke about... then crit for the crits during burst and for offhealing, leaving you with some mastery that you can't reforge out of.

i still wouldn't recommend mastery. crit also affects renew/Pom/flash heal for offhealing situations which with the nerfs that came in make a big difference.

haste for quicker casts as shadow does hard cast quite a bit despite what people may joke about... then crit for the crits during burst and for offhealing, leaving you with some mastery that you can't reforge out of.

That's how I recommend an experienced Spriest gear. It matches my gearing, Talbadar's gearing, and Burial's suggestions over at dusknoir.net - but I run OOM pretty frequently as is, and I'm very pro-active about mana management already - so when people are starting out what I like about mastery is it helps their mana a bit. Crit is definitely the stronger stat though (both because of the burst I mentioned and that it also benefits our healing, where mastery doesn't - as you mentioned). Mastery makes the spec easier to play.

That's how I recommend an experienced Spriest gear. It matches my gearing, Talbadar's gearing, and Burial's suggestions over at dusknoir.net - but I run OOM pretty frequently as is, and I'm very pro-active about mana management already - so when people are starting out what I like about mastery is it helps their mana a bit. Crit is definitely the stronger stat though (both because of the burst I mentioned and that it also benefits our healing, where mastery doesn't - as you mentioned). Mastery makes the spec easier to play.